directly or indirectly

That's the most important part of what you wrote. For what it's worth, I don't disagree with you at all. You're right.

Like I said in my original reply, you can make the argument that Glass-Steagall led to the bank consolidation frenzy that ended up with the subsidizing the "too big too fail" banks. After all, of Lehman and Bear, only one really failed - the other got bailed out, with Fed guarantees and private deal-making.

I spent three years studying the financial crisis and we can have that discussion all day if you want. It would take a lot longer than reddit would probably read. I'm just saying that making a direct connection between the repeal of Glass-Steagall and Lehman / Bear is not something you can do, unless you're making pretty generous assumptions about the subsidy that TBTF (too big to fail) gave the market, which in turn applied to Bear / Lehman, which in turn let them make more money than they otherwise would have without it.

And for the record, I haven't said that Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the 2008 crash. It had a lot to do with 2008. It wasn't the only thing - the biggest, in my opinion, was a neoliberal zeitgeist personified by Greenspan his self-professed faith in self-interested banking actors, with the repeal of Glass-Steagall being only a reflection of that zeitgeist.

I completely remember the week of September 15 2008, I had just moved to a new state and spent the day getting my car repaired and sat in a dealer's shop watching the market tick down 500, 600, eventually 700 points. That's what fueled my interest in financial matters at the very beginning. And its what fuels my interest now.

Anyway we're not disagreeing. You're right. I only disagree with making a direct connection between Glass-Steagall and the two specific banks of Lehman and Bear. The whole zeitgeist of economic regulation was fucked, and thats what made the system fall. Glass-Steagall was a part of that, but so was the CFTC's refusal to regulate derivatives, so was Greenspan's libertarian faith in free markets, and so was everything in regulation post-Reagan.